Made Nice Is Fast and Casual. But Is It Good?

New Yorkers will have more idle hours on their hands, or at least more time to watch otter videos at work, if Made Nice turns out to be the future of dining in New York.

The food appears within 10 minutes from the moment you walk through the door on West 28th Street. Before that happens, you choose one of the eight or so main courses pictured on the wall, give your order to an extroverted host who taps it into a hand-held screen, and mill around the silverware and condiment station until you hear your name and are handed your meal on a charcoal-colored tray that doubles as a place mat.

This routine may sound familiar and indeed it is, being the basic model of fast-casual restaurants from Shake Shack on down. Made Nice has nipped and tucked the formula all around, but the biggest difference is what’s on the tray. It’s not a burger or a grain bowl but a multicolored, photogenic and meticulously arranged plate that bears at least a familial resemblance to the cooking at Eleven Madison Park and the NoMad.

Like those two restaurants, Made Nice is under the ownership and direction of the chef Daniel Humm and his collaborator, Will Guidara. To bring some of their usual meticulous care and a few glimmers of their artistry to a high-speed operation is the trick Made Nice is trying to pull off. To do so, the two owners have requisitioned a sous-chef from Eleven Madison Park, Danny DiStefano, to run the enormous kitchen, while Mr. Humm waves his magic wand somewhere offstage.

As trays loaded with salad-like dishes leave the counter, you can glimpse bits and pieces of the two more formal restaurants flying by, like the scraps of Kansas that Dorothy sees caught in the twister. Look — it’s the NoMad chicken! And isn’t that the pork confit from Eleven Madison Park?

Well, no, not really, as you will discover when you sit down and eat. The Made Nice confit doesn’t have the creaminess or the concentrated delicacy that suckling pig gives the original, or the golden roof of crisp skin. It’s a dark brick of shredded pork, a heavy-tasting and oddly inert centerpiece for a summer salad of shaved corn, watercress and wheat berries.

Served at night and on Saturdays, the chicken is the only major dish at Made Nice that could not even by the most elastic definition be called a salad. With a bread stuffing under its browned skin, it does resemble the NoMad chicken from a distance.

But the one at NoMad tastes as if it comes from some lost island where the gene that controls delicious chicken flavor has been passed down intact for centuries. The Made Nice chicken, by contrast, is ordinary — moist without being juicy, as if all its flavor had leaked out of the meat in order to make the stuffing as gummy as possible. The price is $22 for half a chicken and skinny fries. The fries are very good.

Nobody should be surprised when a stripped-down dish that can be ready in five minutes and costs, on average, about $14 isn’t as wonderful as one that was fluffed to greatness for its role in a $295 tasting menu. It’s not a fair fight, yet it’s one that Mr. Humm and Mr. Guidara have invited by trying to link their fast-casual business with their other restaurants.

But some of the food at Made Nice doesn’t just suffer by comparison; it can also suffer all on its own.

The curried cauliflower is said to be a callout to another standby at the NoMad. I don’t remember trying it there, so I can’t say whether it’s so unevenly cooked that some pieces are brown and collapsed while others are white, crunchy and barely cooked. That’s how the cauliflower at Made Nice was, though. It tasted nothing like a real curry, and only a little bit like curry powder.

Another dish is called chicken rice. The rice tastes like tomatoes and needs salt. The chicken seems exhausted. Imagine a chain of Cuban restaurants started by retired employees of the Olive Garden. This could be their arroz con pollo.

Of the nine major dishes on the current menu, there are three I would be happy to eat again. One is a salad of watermelon and quinoa that has just enough twists and turns to stand out, like crisp pistachios and soft, creamy feta. Another, seared hanger steak slices over roasted broccoli that is chopped and seasoned with lime, may not sound like a winning combination, but it is. A third is smoked salmon salad whose croutons are, in fact, little fried cubes of shredded potato.

Actually, there is a fourth dish worth revisiting, though I wouldn’t try to make a meal of it: the milk and honey sundae. The ice cream is soft serve — milk, uncontaminated by vanilla — strewn with a variety of fun, crunchy bits made from milk or honey. It’s $6.

The sundae combines sophistication and pleasure better than anything else on the menu. It is also the only item you can’t get delivered. I suspect these things may be related.

That enormous kitchen wasn’t built solely to feed the 30 or so people who can be seated in the restaurant. It was designed to handle a tall pile of takeout and delivery orders. So, in fact, were the recipes. Aside from the sundae, everything is engineered to look and taste almost as good after being sealed with a plastic lid, packed into a bag and carted 10 blocks.

According to one projection cited by The Atlantic, the market for delivery orders placed online will have grown 15 times faster than the rest of the restaurant business by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, restaurants across the country are anxiously watching as foot traffic falls at lunch and dinner.

These twin trends have created a new and nearly invisible kind of restaurant with no dining room, just a commissary kitchen that fulfills orders to go. They’re called ghost restaurants. Made Nice seems to be something different. Its small dining room is merely the tip of a much bigger operation lurking below the surface. It’s an iceberg restaurant.

To test it out, I ate one of my three Made Nice meals at The New York Times Building. My order showed up about a minute late, which counts as early given Midtown rush-hour traffic, and was pretty much as advertised. The fried chicken skins that are supposed to be scattered over the gravy-like chicken velouté didn’t show up, and a caper-dill relish that the menu said came with the tuna niçoise was smeared on the pork confit and the cod Provençal as well.

Nothing was hot after about 30 minutes in transit. But the cooked items were still warm, the lettuce and other raw ingredients hadn’t wilted, and all the plates looked as if they had been primped by a food stylist for an overhead shot. Eating food like this at your desk would not feel like a complete surrender.

Eating it in a restaurant is another story. Whether the same recipes can suit both experiences is the question Made Nice asks. Your own answer will depend on whether you are hoping for food that is quick, inexpensive and as delicious as you would expect from one of the city’s best-known chefs, or are willing to settle for two out of three.